Racial Quotas, Tax Cuts, and Foreign Enemies

This is part three of a series that examines President John Kennedy’s liberal beliefs and breaks down the misrepresentations of JFK by Larry Elder. Elder presented a very distorted version of JFK in a 2017 online piece, “John F. Kennedy: What Would He Think of His Party?” that both reflects and informs the opinions of many people on the political right who wish to pretend that Kennedy would be a Republican or a conservative, if he were alive today. If you have not read Part 1 of this series, I advise you begin there.

In Part 2, I discussed Elder’s invocation of Ronald Reagan and Charlton Heston too suggest some kind of a connection with JFK and the alleged radicalization of the Democratic Party, which doesn’t work. Elder’s next tactic is to cite specific hot button issues today and pull President Kennedy into his camp for each of them. Here we will deal with the first three: Racial Quotas, Tax Cuts, and Foreign Enemies.

Racial Quotas

“On racial preferences,” Elder quotes an answer Kennedy once gave to a question specifically about, “job quotas by race.” JFK says that quotas are not the solution, but does that tell us everything we need to know about Kennedy’s views, in all cases, for his time and evermore? Does “racial preferences” always mean “quotas?” And how does this relate to “affirmative action?” Should we pay no attention to the fact that Kennedy’s Executive Order 10925: Establishing the President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, was the first document to use the term “affirmative action?”

Given that President Kennedy was already being labeled a communist agent for supporting Civil Rights, and he was generally careful about what he said on the subject, it is difficult to say where JFK was really at on the subject and how his thinking may have developed as the times changed, but there is no basis to reasonably say he was moving more to the right on the matter.

Tax Cuts

Similarly, “on tax cuts,” Elder quotes a piece of a 1962 speech where Kennedy says, “the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now.” This implies that JFK was always in favor of cutting taxes, and always would be, seeing this as the best way to raise revenues, no matter the time and place. Elder ignores the opening of the speech, where President Kennedy makes it clear that he was focused on, “our present tax system, developed as it was, in good part, during World War II.” Under that system, rates ranged from 20% to 91%. By contrast, in 2017 the rates ranged from 10% to 39.6%.

JFK’s efforts to reform a wartime system of very high taxes, more than a decade after the end of the war, gives us a very incomplete view of his overall thinking on tax cuts or taxation. Nevertheless, similar misrepresentations go back to at least the 1970s, when Governor Reagan began using them to help his efforts to move into the White House.

Foreign Enemies

Then there is the issue of, “dealing with foreign enemies,” and Elder tells us, “JFK believed, as Reagan did, in peace through strength, not strength through peace.” I only know of one politician who campaigned on a doctrine of, “strength through peace,” Democrat Representative Dennis “Koo-Koo” Kucinich, who was an atypical Democrat, member of Congress, so this isn’t really an either or choice. Who hasn’t campaigned on keeping the US strong? We can raise questions about how effectively each leader has followed through on this but peace through strength is a fairly common belief and talking point that goes back to President Eisenhower.

Elder continues:

In his inaugural address, Kennedy said, “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

True, but did he actually do this? Was the Bay of Pigs an example of supporting our friends and opposing a foe to assure the success of liberty? Did he bear any burden or meet any hardship? Additionally, after the Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK clearly decided he had to try to move in a new direction or risk the end of humanity. This was very apparent in the Commencement Address he gave at the American University, on June 10, 1963:

I have, therefore, chosen this time and this place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth is too rarely perceived–yet it is the most important topic on earth: world peace. 

What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children–not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women–not merely peace in our time but peace for all time. 

I speak of peace because of the new face of war. Total war makes no sense in an age when great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces. It makes no sense in an age when a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all the allied air forces in the Second World War. It makes no sense in an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn. 

…

I speak of peace, therefore, as the necessary rational end of rational men. I realize that the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war–and frequently the words of the pursuer fall on deaf ears. But we have no more urgent task. 

Some say that it is useless to speak of world peace or world law or world disarmament–and that it will be useless until the leaders of the Soviet Union adopt a more enlightened attitude. I hope they do. I believe we can help them do it. But I also believe that we must reexamine our own attitude–as individuals and as a Nation–for our attitude is as essential as theirs. And every graduate of this school, every thoughtful citizen who despairs of war and wishes to bring peace, should begin by looking inward–by examining his own attitude toward the possibilities of peace, toward the Soviet Union, toward the course of the cold war and toward freedom and peace here at home.

This policy went beyond “peace through strength,” emphasizing that military might alone cannot guarantee lasting peace. And, speaking of distance between presidential words and deeds, what did President Reagan do after 241 American and 58 French troops, along with six civilians, were murdered by two suicide bombers in Beirut in 1983? Nothing. Then, about six months later, our forces packed up and left.

You can argue this was prudent and necessary. You could say that Reagan should never have sent the Marines there in the first place and even argue that it was wise and brave of him to recognize his mistake. What you can’t do is say this was an example of strength that promoted peace. It’s easy to play tough and pretend that you could, “Get the job done,” through force of arms alone, as Reagan did when he was first running for Governor of California in October of 1965, proclaiming a nearly genocidal policy in South East Asia:

It’s silly talking about how many years we will have to spend in the jungles of Vietnam when we could pave the whole country and put parking stripes on it and still be home by Christmas.

It’s something very different when people are being slaughtered based on your orders and you only seem to have bad options available to you.

Ike Stands Alone

One more, very important and often overlooked point about “peace through strength” is that the man most associated with it, President Eisenhower was in a unique situation. The US nuclear stockpile was still far superior to the USSRs stockpile when Ike came to the White House and no one before or since has brought so much military credibility to the table. As Evan Thomas observes in his book, Ike’s Bluff:

Eisenhower’s approach worked only for Eisenhower. Kennedy and Johnson could not have pulled it off even if they had wanted to. They lacked the credibility that was uniquely Eisenhower’s; they had not liberated Europe or made enormous life-and-death decisions on the battlefield. Instead, believing that neither side would engage in nuclear war (“mutual assured destruction,” or MAD, as it was articulated by JFK’s defense secretary Robert McNamara), Kennedy and Johnson adopted a policy of “flexible response” that made possible the small wars Eisenhower did his best to avoid. The result was Vietnam.

Later, Thomas reiterates this:

During the presidential campaign, Kennedy had rejected Eisenhower’s doctrine of massive retaliation in favor of “flexible response,” the capacity to fight small wars. General Maxwell Taylor, who as Army Chief of Staff had unsuccessfully beseeched Ike to build up conventional forces, was now JFK’s main military adviser. The key to Ike’s all-or-nothing doctrine was his personal credibility. He had been able to bluff because of who he was and what he had done—the man who had liberated Europe in World War II and repeatedly faced down Soviet and Red Chinese aggression in the Cold War. Former lieutenant Kennedy had no such bona fides.

It’s worth noting that Reagan didn’t even have the bona fides of serving in combat, which JFK had. Reagan, like that other legendary Hollywood tough guy, John Wayne, chose to stay in Hollywood, acting and making money, rather than putting his life on the line for the republic. Our enemies certainly knew this and they did not walk as carefully around Reagan, or any President after Eisenhower, the way they had done with Eisenhower.

The Shallow End of the Pool

Larry Elder loves bragging about how logical and fact-based he is. In a frequently repeated online bio, Elder claims to use:

…such old-fashioned things as evidence and logic. Larry shines the bright light of reasoned analysis on many of the myths and hypocrisies apparent in our system of government, our society, and the media itself. He slays dragons and topples sacred cows using facts, common sense and a ready wit.

In reality, this is just bluster. Elder ignores reality’s depths in favor of the shallow end of the pool. Then he has the nerve to boast about what a great swimmer he is. Or, to put it another way, he’s just wrong. Donkeys don’t fit into Elephant swimsuits and President John Kennedy wouldn’t be a Republican today.